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They don’t talk much, anymore. Whatever you would call their relationship, it had never been the healthiest, but now it boils down to little more than the way the Worlds throw them together and the fact that they both know too much about each other. The fact that they owe their existences on the other.
When they meet, they fight, or they fuck, or more often than not they do both.
And then whoever wakes up first is the first to leave.
They both so rarely go home, for all that it can be called a home, now, empty and covered in dust save the photo developing room Tsukasa now has to use himself and the place he pretends he doesn’t know Daiki keeps his treasures.
And the bedroom, he supposes. The bed Natsumi had made him help drag up the stairs because “Well you’re always the one complaining about how crowded it is.” A picture still up of the three of them that Tsukasa had taken yet had come out almost perfectly next to the one Eijiro had taken right after the battle with Super Shocker.
Smiling.
Happy.
Alive.
Really, the only way to tell the other’s passed through their little empty world is how they always seem to knock a new background down, move the photo studio to another world.
Even on the anniversaries, they always missed each other, somehow.
Or, well, they had.
“Kaitou?”
Kaitou jumps from the couch, where he’d been sitting and fiddling with some treasure or other.
“Tsukasa,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
Tsukasa opens his mouth and freezes.
I wanted to go home, he doesn’t say.
My predecessors told me I was a failure and they were right for the second time, he doesn’t say.
Last night I woke from a nightmare of their screams for the first time in two months, he doesn’t say.
I miss them.
I miss having a home.
Maybe now I have just been searching for a place to die. Because the place where I lived is empty now.
He doesn’t say that, either.
“What are you ?” is what he says instead.
Daiki smirks, but it doesn’t meet his eyes.
“I found some treasure I like, and you left the place here,” he says. “Not a big deal.”
Tsukasa is honestly too tired to question him, though.
“Forget it, though,” Daiki continues, grabbing his jacket from a nearby chair. Tsukasa has the sudden inexplicable thought that he dyed his hair. “I was about to leave, anyways. Besides, this was always your home over mine.”
“They wouldn’t say that,” Tsukasa does say, not realizing he’s said that out loud until Daiki looks at him, sharply. The words just kind of keep tumbling out, after that. “That panel in the hall, where you stash treasures - Natsumikan made it, and Yuusuke counted the days you were gone, and I…”
“You what, Tsukasa?” Daiki asks. It’s a mix of anger and hope.
“I miss you more than I miss them, sometimes,” Tsukasa admits. “Because I know you’re still out there.”
Daiki blinks. Stares. Laughs.
Collapses back on the couch.
“I would have killed for you to tell me that, once,” he says. “I really fucking would have. Why are you even saying this now?”
“Because…”
Because maybe my predecessors were right, again. Because you’re the only thing I have left that even keeps me alive, in the first place. Because…
“I know now that my journey for a place to die is really looking for a place to live,” he’d told his predecessor.
Tsukasa isn’t good at this, not with people he knows. Not when there are so many consequences, and Daiki always runs from this conversation, on the rare attempts Tsukasa tries to start it.
“I love you.”
“I…”
“Stay?”
Daiki laughs again.
“You do know that this doesn’t change anything, right?” He asks. He doesn’t get up, though.
“But we can try,” Tsukasa says, sitting on one of the chairs across from him. “Try to live for the future, again.”
“I…”
Tsukasa leans over the table and kisses him.
When he pulls back, Daiki snarks “haven’t done that here in a long time…
“I missed it.”
Tsukasa can’t help the smile crossing his face as Daiki’s own nervous real one appears.
Maybe this… whatever happens next… can open a new chapter in his story.